Appendix (To Chapter 2)[42]
Constance Garnett translation
Appendix (To Chapter 2)[42]
What has changed? The years ’59 and ’60 have widened the horizon. Persons and parties are more clearly defined, some have grown stronger, others have vanished. With strained attention, checking not only every criticism, but even the throbbing of our hearts, we have watched over those dear to us for these last two years. They have at times disappeared behind the smoke of battle, at times have stood out vividly against it, growing vaster every minute, and again have vanished in the smoke. At this moment it has passed away and we can breathe again, all those dear to us are safe!
And beyond the smoke, in the shade, apart from the noise of battle, with no share in the rejoicings of victory, with no share in the laurel wreaths, one figure stands out like a colossus.
Cursed by all parties, by the cheated plebeian, by the savage priest, by the cowardly bourgeois, and the scum of Piedmont; vilified by all the organs of all the reactions, from the papal and imperial Moniteur to the liberal eunuchs of Cavour, and the grand eunuch of the London money-changers, The Times (which cannot mention Mazzini’s name without vulgar abuse), he remained not only ‘unshaken in the midst of universal error,’ but with joy and rapture blessing the friends and foes who were carrying out his thought, his plan. Pointing to him, as to some angel of destruction:
‘The people mysteriously saved by him Reviled his sacred head,’[43]
but beside him stood not Kutuzov but Garibaldi. In the person of her hero, her deliverer, Italy did not break with Mazzini. How was it Garibaldi did not yield him half his laurels? Why did he not openly avow that he went hand in hand with him? Why did not the abandoned triumvir of Rome urge his claims? Why did Mazzini himself beg Garibaldi not to mention him? And why did the popular leader, pure-hearted as a child, keep silence and thus falsely admit the breach?
There was something dearer to both than their persons, their names, their reputations ... Italy!
And the vulgar world of to-day did not understand them. It could not grasp such greatness; its bookkeeping is not equal to adjusting the accounts of such a debit and credit!
Garibaldi has become more than ever a figure from Cornelius Nepos; he has the same antique grandeur on his little farm, the same simple-hearted, pure grandeur, as a description from Homer or a Greek statue. No trace of rhetoric, of melodrama, of diplomacy. They are superfluous in the heroic epic; when it was over and everyday life began, then the King dismissed him as one dismisses the driver who has brought one to one’s destination and, embarrassed at not being able to give him a tip, surpassed Austria in his colossal ingratitude; while Garibaldi did not resent it, but, with a smile on his face and fifty scudi in his pocket, went out from the palaces of the countries he had subdued, leaving the courtiers to reckon his expenses and decide that he had spoiled the bear’s skin.
They might amuse themselves as they pleased: half of the great work was done, if Italy was welded into one and the white cretins had been driven out.
There were painful moments for Garibaldi. He is captivated by people; just as he was captivated by Alexandre Dumas, he is captivated by Victor Emmanuel; the King’s lack of delicate feeling wounds him, the King knows this, and, to soften him, sends pheasants killed by his own hands, flowers from his own garden, and loving notes inscribed: ‘Sempre il tuo amico Vittorio.’
For Mazzini, people do not exist, for him nothing exists but the cause and, indeed, the one cause; he himself exists, ‘lives and moves,’ only in it. However many pheasants and flowers the King might send him, he would not be touched. But he would at once collaborate, not only with him whom he reckons a good though foolish man, but even with his Talleyrand in miniature, whom he does not reckon a good or even a decent man. Mazzini is an ascetic, the Calvin, the Procida[44] of Italian emancipation. One-sided, for ever absorbed by one idea, for ever ready and on his guard, Mazzini keeps his vigil with the same obstinacy and patience with which he created a compact party out of scattered individuals and vague yearnings, and, after a dozen failures, called out Garibaldi and his army of half-free Italy, and preserved the living, infallible hope of its unity. Day and night, catching fish and going out hunting, lying down and getting up, Garibaldi and his followers see the thin, melancholy hand of Mazzini pointing to Rome, and they will still march thither.
I did wrong in omitting from a fragment that I have published already some pages about Mazzini; his figure has not come out so clearly without them. I dwelt particularly on his breach with Garibaldi in 1854 and on my difference of opinion with him. I did this through delicacy, but such delicacy is too petty for Mazzini, there is no need to keep anything back about such men, there is no need to spare them!
After his return from Naples he wrote me a note; I hastened to him, I had a pang at my heart when I saw him, I was still expecting to find him sad and wounded in his love, his position was tragic in the extreme. I did in fact find him older physically but younger in soul; with both hands stretched out, as his habit was, he rushed towards me with the words: ‘And so at last it is coming true!’ There was a look of delight in his eyes, and his voice trembled.
He spent the whole evening telling me of the time that preceded the expedition to Sicily, of his relations with Victor Emmanuel, then of Naples. In the enthusiasm, in the love with which he talked of Garibaldi’s victories and heroic deeds, there was as much affection for him as in his abuse of him for over-trustfulness and inability to read men.
As I listened to him, I tried to catch a single note, a single sound of wounded pride, and I could not catch it; he was sad, but sad like a mother abandoned for the time by a beloved son—she knows that the son will come back and, more than that, knows that the son is happy: that covers everything for her.
Mazzini is full of hopes, he stands closer to Garibaldi than ever. With a smile he described how Neapolitan crowds, incited by the agents of Cavour, surrounded his house, shouting: ‘Death to Mazzini!’ They had been persuaded, among other things, that Mazzini was a ‘Bourbon republican.’
‘There were several men and one young Russian with me at the time,’ he told me; ‘he was surprised at our going on talking as before. “Don’t be uneasy,” I said to soothe him, “they won’t kill me, they will only shout!”’
No, there is no need to spare men like that!
January 31, 1861.